Free Grace by Natashia Deon

pleasure inside Cynthia, Man held her the way she holds Johnny at night. So when Man walked out, Johnny beat him around the waist with both fists, caught one in Man’s crotch. Man twisted Johnny’s arms behind him. Told Cynthia, control your son, said, have a nice day.
    Happened so fast, Cynthia didn’t do nothin.
    Johnny lets men walk by now.
    He watches ’em go in her door one way, buckling their belts on the way out. They step over him in the doorway like he ain’t a boy wanting his momma.
    We all hear her good reasons through our thin walls and empty hallways. She yell, she got bills to pay, his mouth to feed, clothes and shelter Johnny needs.
    We only grumble. Go back to our own hard days and hard nights. I tend to my swollen and parched brown ankles—be on my feet all day—got to shut up the voices in my head telling me to leave this place and go north. But Johnny, he’s tracking years, thinking of the future, wanting his momma’s touches, remembering the present as if it’s time already gone.
    So sometimes, he’ll hang on her arm when a customer comes, wanting her to touch him, even if it’s to push him away.
    Sometimes, he’ll kick and scream ’til she picks him up—an accident hug—before she sets him at the end of the hallway.
    Sometimes, when she in the middle of doing her business, he’ll walk in on her. Stand next to her. Asking for water.
    â€œY OU CAN HAVE it if you want,” I tell him. It’s the first time I’ve spoke since I got here. “The sweet potato,” I say. I speak because I know what it’s like to wait behind walls the way he do, to listen to a mother’s music. But I had Hazel. He ain’t got nobody.
    He smiles. He don’t talk, neither. Maybe he a real mute.
    â€œYou don’t go tellin nobody I got a voice, you hear me?”
    He laughs like a old man, in hoarse shrills.
    â€œWhat’s funny?” I say. He fixes his happy face on me and his expression reminds me of those times I seen him dance with his momma. Dance ’cause they both hurting. Dance ’cause she save her sinless moves for him.
    He shrieks again and the sound makes me laugh the loudest I have since I been here. And it feels good, too.
    Our laughter is the only thing we own.

9 / 1855
    Tallassee, Alabama
    A FTER THE VAPORS got Josey, Charles brought her here to the Graham house where she been resting. Got hisself sent home to wait ’cause he was pacing too loud and Missus Graham don’t like to be near him long on account of his burn scars. Some people get nervous around bodies that move or look different, deformed or retarded. She’s one of them. But I ain’t leaving. Been passing time rushing ’round this big house and through its downstairs corridors, along dustless floors and hand-carved finishings. Been in the grand ballroom twice, along its papered walls and white moldings, and up to the ceiling where clear crystals hang.
    I settle in this darkened hallway. Useless pretty furniture line the path to the room where Josey is. I go through its closed double door. The sun through the window casts a yellow mist of color, tinting everything. There’s a stillness here. A quiet. This sound of nothing strikes me like deafness.
    There’s a chaos here, too. The way things been put together wrong. Like across the room, there’s a statue of a naked baby angel on a white column and its base teeters on the thick edge of an African rug colored a mess of orange and red and green patterns. Above the fireplace, a goldframe holds prisoner the likenesses of a sad white woman and sad white man dressed in black. And next to it, muted green curtains climb the heights of two tall windows. Between ’em is a redwood bed shaped like a dead horse on its back. Mosquito netting swoops down from where the hooves would be and touches the floor.
    A tapping near the window brings the sound back to the room.
    Missus